... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 52) Winter 2006/7 Last| Contents| Next Issue 52 My encounter with George K. Young and Tory Action, 1979-1988 John Andrews In 1978 I read a report of a speech on subversion by a Mr G. K. Young( 'GKY') a former 'deputy director' of MI6. It said that he was a banker. I had been a student at LSE 1972-1975, my tutor was an expert on the Soviet Bloc and I had studied Soviet politics. Fears of Soviet subversion may seem naïve now, but were widespread at the time, so I was interested. I found GKY's address from Who's Who. ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 15) February 1988 Last| Contents| Next Issue 15 The Tory Right between the wars Anti-Alienism in England after the First World War- David Cesarani- in Immigrants and Minorities, March 1987 Pressure Groups, Tory Businessmen and the aura of political corruption before the First World War- Frans Coetzee- in Historical Journal, December 1986 Military Intelligence and the defence of the realm: the surveillance of soldiers and civilians in Britain during the First World War- David Englander- in British Society for the Study of Labour History, Volume 52, No.1, 1987 The Ideology of the British Right, 1918-39 G.C. Webber- Croom Helm, London 1987 ...

... Future historians of the Conservative Party may discover that upon its heart in the 1960s "Rhodesia" was indelibly graven.(1) With the arrival of Mrs Thatcher in 1975 came "the New Right", with about as much claim to be called "new" as had the "New Left' a decade earlier. Although the Tory right has a history with the same kinds of continuities and discontinuities as the Labour left, it lacks a detailed historical record like there is of the Labour left, for the Tory right has mostly organised semi-clandestinely.(2) The best example of this is the 92 Group, founded by Patrick Wall around 1964 (precise information is ...

... and most expensive privately-funded political dirty tricks campaign in recent British history. The astonishing 15-year campaign waged against Owen Oyston by Michael Murrin, the owner of a fish and chip shop in the village of Longridge, Lancs, was backed by help and cash payments raised by two former government ministers and a millionaire friend of Margaret Thatcher. The former Tory ministers are Sir Robert Atkins and Lord Blaker. Their target was the Labour Party's biggest private contributor in the days of Neil Kinnock's leadership. Sir Robert Atkins was once John Major's best friend in the Commons. He was the MP for South Ribble from 1983 to 1996 and a minister at the Department of Trade and Industry and Northern Ireland ...

... only contested 427 out of 615); or that they had a serious prospect of winning one in 1924 (there were only about 100 winnable marginals, and only 40 of those were Tory-Labour- the rest were either Liberal-held, or three-way splits, when the Liberals had been keeping Labour out of office since 1923); or that the Tories' 154 net gains in 1924 came from Labour (two thirds were from the Liberals); or that the increase in the Tory vote came from former Labour voters. Labour's numerical vote increased by 24%: if Zinoviev was meant to reduce the Labour vote, it was a total failure. Labour's vote was up on 1923 in ...

... organisation, even if he is just a figurehead, doesn't seem to have yet filtered through to the mainstream media in Britain. With his hairpiece and all, the 'Mad Major' Wall is often presented as something of a figure of fun- but he isn't that. His '92 Group' seems to have remained a well-kept secret within the Tory Party for over twenty years until 1983, and is now reported to be the largest Tory Party grouping at Westminster, with over 80 MPs. The 'New Right' discovered by the media in the late 1970s (essentially after Thatcher came to power), is little more than an expression of the media's complete lack of interest in the ...

... , and less frequently commented on, the UK economy as a whole was becoming self-sufficient in oil, without apparently gaining anything from it. Ah-ha, I thought, I smell a big rip-off. I wonder how it's being done? So I did a little digging, thought I could see how the ideology of the Thatcher wing of the Tory Party connected to the disappearance of oil revenues from the UK economy; and wrote a piece called 'The Theft of North Sea Oil' which I eventually sent to Tribune in 1986. The editor at the time, Phil Kelly, quite rightly declined it: it wasn't anywhere near finished. I put it in a file and got on ...

... Another of the corporatist groups financed by Midlands industrialists, the British Commonwealth Union (BCU), led by the Birmingham MP, Sir Patrick Hannon, began funding MPs to form an Industrial Group in Parliament. The first 11 candidates were subsidised by the BCU in the 1918 election: by 1924 the group in parliament consisted of 105 (mostly Tory) members. Hannon's Industrial Group chiefly wanted government protection of British industry against foreign competition, but, to quote Hannon, they also 'wanted the largest measure of freedom in the relationship between capital and labour and the least state intervention possible.’ 6 These early corporatist dreams failed for a number of reasons. Employer organisations were none too happy at ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 33) Summer 1997 Last| Contents| Next Issue 33 New Labour, New Atlanticism: US and Tory intervention in the unions since the 1970s David Osler All four of Tony Blair's new political appointees at the Ministry of Defence are part of Labour's Atlanticist network. Three of them, George Robertson, Lord John Gilbert and John Speller, are members of two interrelated bodies, the Atlantic Council and its labour movement wing, the Trades Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU). The fourth, Dr John Reid, has spoken at TUCETU conferences. Peter Mandelson, the most important back-stage player in British politics, has written a pamphlet ...

... . I don't propose here to pore over why I think Labour's 1970s economic record was nowhere near as bad as the NuLab crowd seem to accept. What is evident to me – and this whole process was repeated during the last election – is that the Labour leadership is scared shitless of defending its economic record when compared to that of the Tories. Saying that doesn't make past mistakes any better of course, but it does mean that Labour repeatedly fails to defend or, more importantly, does not try to understand the lessons of its record, while always yielding to the Tories' economic tune. What becomes a political party – a 'democratic socialist' party to boot – when ...